Thursday, May 26, 2016

The most
notorious Supreme Court ruling of recent times is 2010’s Citizens United v.
F.E.C. This ruling has captured many an imagination with the idea that the
Court somehow turned “corporations into people” or that money was
created into speech. This article is not about propagating these useless
catchphrases, rather, it is about how independent campaign expenditure prohibitions bump into 1st Amendment protections. I look at the history of
attempts to regulate independent campaign expenditures and how, in the process, a state censorship board was created.